The In-Between — RIMA STAINES

TWILIGHT - the time “between dog and wolf” - is that liminal cusp when an imaginal doorway can open to other worlds. In this astounding performance of the new collaboration between composer and musician Jean-Marc Zelwer and artist Rima Staines, you will be taken by the hand through this doorway. Witness Rima create a large wonder-filled narrative painting live on stage in conversation with Jean-Marc’s world-spanning, deeply-evocative sonic tapestry. Together they will enchant (“sing in”) a mythic third place: a wonderland inside you.

Jean-Marc Zelwer is a composer and multi-instrumentalist who has been creating music for theatre, circus, film, dance and beyond for over 30 years.

A painter in sound, he composes and performs with varied and rare instruments (Kashmiri santur, Swedish nyckelharpa, tromba marina, accordion, clarinet, electronic tanpura, toy piano, melodica, bone & gourd flutes, bottlephone, theremin, banjoline...) and transports the listener into a theatre of many worlds - via Eastern Europe, Senegal, France, India, Gypsy encampments and Jewish wedding parties, creating a unique and virtuosic marriage of soulful lament and sensuous paradise which moves and delights in equal measure.

Rima Staines is an artist whose work straddles myth, magical realism and the folk arts. She has worked over the years predominantly as a painter, but also with music, writing, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, theatre, puppetry, animation and book arts.

Her visual world is an umber and madder-infused chapel of misfits and magicians, story-rich and alchemical. Her paintings, which feel both ancient and familiar at once, have been exhibited and published internationally.

Rima has a long-held fascination with the idea of the liminal - that which lies at the edge of culture and society as well as the literal boundaries between one place and another, both metaphorical and real - and with the power of art that comes from that place. Her work is a kind of “Iconography of the Otherworld”.

RIMA's Paintings tools-IMG_20230730_174538 (1).jpg

RIMA SAYS:

“I came across Jean-Marc Zelwer’s music when I was a young artist, just out of art school in London. Since then, his music has accompanied me and been a profoundly important touchstone in my creative practice over the past two decades. It is the music I have returned and returned to. I found something in it that felt like home to me: it conjures a world, east-of-here, that is painted somehow in the same pigments I use in my own work and it dances on those achingly familiar borderlands between pathos and beauty. As a composer he has a phenomenal ability to tell stories of the heart that speak to all our senses and incarnations at once. After all this time I am deeply honoured to be intertwining our artistic worlds.”

"J'ai découvert la musique de Jean-Marc Zelwer quand j'étais une jeune artiste, tout juste sortie de l'école d'art à Londres. Depuis lors, sa musique m'a accompagnée et a été une pierre de touche profondément importante dans ma pratique créative au cours des deux dernières décennies. C'est la musique vers laquelle je suis revenue et revenue. J'y ai trouvé quelque chose qui m'a semblé familier : il évoque un monde, à l'est d'ici, qui est peint d'une manière ou d'une autre dans les mêmes pigments que ceux que j'utilise dans mon propre travail et qui danse sur ces frontières douloureusement familières entre le pathos et la beauté. En tant que compositeur, il a une capacité phénoménale à raconter les “histoires du cœur” qui s’adressent à tous nos sens et incarnations à la fois. Après tout ce temps, je suis profondément honorée d'entrelacer nos mondes artistiques.”

JEAN-MARC SAYS:

“Rima Staines is one of those contemporary artists who care nothing for fashions and maintain a discreet but powerful fire under the cauldron of their visions. Her neo-medieval and poetic colours and subtle typographic lines have always inspired me and at times moved me deeply. These works have the power to provoke unique vibrations in me. It is only natural that our paths, which crossed almost twenty years ago decided today to come together, without asking our opinion, like strings resonating in sympathy.”

“Rima Staines fait partie des artistes contemporains qui n’ont cure des modes et entretiennent un feu discret mais puissant sous le chaudron de leurs visions. Les siennes, aux couleurs néo médiévales et poétiques et aux subtils traçés typographiques m’ont toujours inspiré et parfois ému profondément. Ses oeuvres ont la capacité de déclencher en moi des vibrations particulières.

C’est tout naturellement que nos chemins qui s’étaient croisés il y a plus de vingt ans ont décidé aujourd’hui de se rejoindre, sans nous demander notre avis, tels des cordes entrant en résonance par sympathie.”